Installing the .NET 2 framework to run CSS Vista corrupted my registry and the laptop went straight into BSOD when booting. Therefore I had to parallel install Windows (as the repair explanations on MSDN didn’t work) and got the chance to clean up the mess that accumulated over the last 3 years. It was a great feeling simply deleting folders to get rid of Software, much like a Mac…

Anyways, here is the Software I consider really necessary for me to work efficiently, maybe you can find some things you hadn’t used or known yet, and I am happy to get more tips in the comments. (more…)

A friend of mine wanted a christmas / advent calendar with 50ies pin-ups, and I couldn’t find one, so I scanned some and made an online calendar for her. As those are copyrighted, I will not reveal the pinups here, but instead offer you the script oft the calendar to use with your own pictures.

• See the calendar in action
• See a calendar for cheaters that works this month
• Download the script pack with demo images – 880KB Zip
• Download the script pack without demo images – 92KB Zip

What does it do?

The script shows all the links of the different days pointing to a “not yet” image on days that are in the future, and points to the real image on days that are in the past or the current one. Clicking the image gets you back to the calendar.

How to alter the display?

Simply replace the images 1.jpg to 24.jpg in the “ups” folder with your images. 25.jpg is the “not yet available” image.
The page whole look+feel is defined in styles.css. The calendar is an unordered list with the ID “calendar”, the image is a DIV with the ID “pic” containing a link around an image.
The different day links are positioned via the ID l1 to l24 settings in the CSS.
You can change all these settings in the variables section of the xmascalendar.php file:


$pictureFolder='ups';
$month=12;
$clickableClass='done';
$calendarID='calendar';
$pictureID='pic';


Why in PHP and not in JavaScript?

This functionality could of course also be done in JavaScript, but that would make it easy to cheat by changing the computer’s date. You can of course cheat now by looking in the folder for the images themselves, but there are ways to prevent that server-side.

Yes, you could do that in AJAX with the PHP just doing the date checking, but frankly, I am too lazy right now :-)

Enjoy.

I hinted for some time now, that I was working on a ZenGarden-type site that simulates a CMS environment.

CSS Zen Garden did and does a tremendous job in educating web designers in the ways of CSS and showed that you can completely redesign one HTML document with different style sheets.

Now it is time we did the same for the enterprise level market, where high level CMS vendors still consider CSS too hard or not flexible enough to maintain the style of pages based on ifferent templates and with varying content.

Therefore I started the CSS Toolshed, and will go live with the site soon.
The CSS tool shed is a CMS simulation that has:

– A set of 4 templates for main page layout – Different content in the main content slot on each reload – the content will be different short articles on CSS and web development.

So far my entry is the only one (Click through the different menus to see the different templates – top menu, left hand menu, bottom menu)

I am very ready to go live with this, but I need some demo styles beforehand.
With a variety of styles the impact can be a lot bigger than just with my sorry example.

So, who is up for providing more initial styles?

You can download the 4 sample templates and the blank css files
together with a template guide and submission guidelines.

Put the final CSS files on your server and send them to me directly or via the submission form

Thanks, and hopefully this will become a good resource for developers who cannot control the markup they have to style to the extend the ZenGarden allowed us to.

Some of you may remember Bobby van der Sluis’ Unobtrusive Flash Objects – a clever way to add Flash to pages only when and if the browser supports it.

Paul Colton has now come up with a different idea of making JavaScript and Flash boogie, a JavaScript wrapper for Flash called AFLAX . What this script allows you to do is to script Flash animations with JavaScript – not the Flash IDE or ActionScript.

It does look sexy and pretty cool, but as some other comments at AJAXIAN already pointed out, it seems that we have a hard time to find a good use for this idea. I can imagine that in a closed environment, you can do some nice things with it – like interactive graphs. With Flash being able to talk to the backend and JavaScript doing the same via AJAX it does feel a bit like mixing technologies that don’t need mixing.

Well, I guess we should keep our eyes open what is happening to that.

I just had a good chuckle at this job advertisment on reed.co.uk . If you haven’t seen the WTF yet, check the wage – £17,999 to £18,000. Makes you wonder what extra qualification you need to get the extra pound.

It may be Reed’s system filling those automatically, but I generally found that not only the wages in IT plummeted the last year or so, but with them the quality of job descriptions. I have seen job specs for people I was asked to hire change miraculously to something I really don’t need and got job offers for Senior J2EE roles as I seem to be good in JavaScript.

Read my lips: Java is to JavaScript as car is to carpet.

I am quite sure that a lot of the money wasted in IT these days is because of miscommunication in the hiring process. Did you have similar experiences?